cat power - maybe not

100 Coolest Science Videos on YouTube

http://onlineschool.net/2009/11/16/100-coolest-science-videos-on-youtube/

Rap Exegesis

http://rapexegesis.com/

Statistics

From the series Midway: Message from the Gyre

“These photographs of albatross chicks were made on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.” Courtesy of Chris Jordan.



http://www.chrisjordan.com/
http://flavorwire.com/45351/pic-of-the-day-2-4-million-pounds-of-plastic-pollution
http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=8

Vagina Cosmica by Otolab

Vagina Cosmica - by Otolab from celeste.prize on Vimeo.

Maryanne Amacher (1943-2009)

http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2009/10/maryanne_amacher_1943-2009.html
http://www.maryanneamacher.org/Amacher_Archive_Project/Amacher_Archive_Project.html

Create a font from your own handwriting

At fontcapture.com

TRASH HUMPERS, new film by HARMONY KORINE

Claytronics - Physical Dynamic Rendering

http://singularityhub.com/2009/07/23/claytronics-or-gershenfeld-why-youll-be-able-to-make-almost-anything/

Talks Torsten ReilTorsten Reil: Animating neurobiologist builds better animations

By coding computer simulations with biologically modeled nervous systems, Torsten Reil and his company NaturalMotion breathe life into the animated characters inhabiting the most eye-poppingly realistic games and movies around.

http://www.ted.com/talks/torsten_reil_studies_biology_to_make_animation.html

World Pinhole Camera Day Camera

Download, print and build your own pinhole camera. Follow the instructions and enjoy!
http://www.corbis.readymech.com/en

PERSONAS - How does the Internet see you?

http://personas.media.mit.edu/

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

INTERMEDIA DANCE PERFORMANCES

Intermedia dance performances create peculiar, funny and unexpected movements. The interactive environment deforms the performers body in such an unconsious(?) way that it might not be created into any other setting. Such dance movements resemble to the movements of people with motion impairments and motion disabilities which they are so unpredictable that amaze the audience.

See for example Ursula Erdlicher's "Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited". This is a Live Performance Series choreographed by Web code. In these ten performances the "character" of a Website is embodied by (a) performer(s) who translate(s) the site's HTML code, which is fed in from the Web "on the fly",
Watch video explaning the setting of the project and video documentation of "www.yahoo.com" performance.

See also Palindrome, a performance group from Germany that uses Motion Tracking technology. They are known for its interactive dances. Using bio-sensors and motion tracking technology the music, lighting or video projections are controlled by the dancers' movement.

Watch "Movement controlling Lights" video into the "INTRO TO MO-TRACKING" tab of the videos section which is the best example related to the current post.

Sarah Maple

Interviewed in Flavorwire.


A post in Bitch Magazine.


Her official site

'SCHENGEN Control Observation Point' by Schauplatz International

taken from Laura Palmer Foundation project's description

Schauplatz International, one of the most interesting Swiss independent theatre groups of the moment, employs journalistic methods in its work. The artists always begin by conducting thorough research: interviewing people, searching for information on the Web, inspecting the site, and comparing various viewpoints. The result is a theatre that is community-oriented, political, and documentary. Schauplatz has, for instance, recreated onstage the interviews immigrants have to go through when applying for asylum in Switzerland, re-enacted live the movie Free Willy, and exposed tax fraud in the Swiss town of Zug through the active participation of tax experts and corporate managers. Poland’s admission to the Schengen zone and the fact that Frontex, the European Union’s external-border security agency, is located in Warsaw, were the reasons for Schauplatz’s interest in Warsaw and the 10th-Anniversary Stadium. In the middle of the field of grass that had overgrown the pitch the artists recreated a portion of Poland’s eastern border, which is also the EU’s Eastern border, on a scale of 1:1. A control observation point was constructed on the crown of the stadium, from which viewers were able to monitor the EU’s Eastern frontier. During the eight hour-long live installation, the artists picnicked on the pitch, held discussions about the abstractness of borders, the construction of national identity, and the meaning of the EU flag. Their voices were relayed to the crown of the stadium, and binoculars and telescopes were provided for the viewers to view the action.

The starting point for the performance was the reflection that stadiums and borders are meant to build national identity. While stadiums are concrete architectural objects whose construction takes several years to complete, borders are products of our imagination, involving contracts, symbols, and potential violence. Both borders and stadiums are supposed to tell us who we are. Until recently, Frontex had its offices near the Stadium. The agency, in collaboration with the police, the military, and the secret services operates rapid-intervention teams and organises people-hunts and charter deportations. As a result, illegal immigrants resort to ever more dangerous ways of crossing borders. On their way to work every day, Frontex employees passed the Stadium, a place that, like national borders, used to divide people between legals and illegals. Schauplatz’s one-day live installation required close observation. When the artists saw the 10th-Anniversary Stadium for the first time, they immediately realised that their performance had to dialogue with scale, with dimension — ‘large’ vs. ‘small’, the hugeness of the stadium vs. the littleness of the individual within it. They wanted to give the viewer the possibility of different views. One of those was looking through binoculars at an ordinary piece of grass, where nothing happens. The artists did not force themselves on the stadium; instead they created a situation of live exhibition, turning themselves into objects of display. They also invited special guests.

One of those was software expert Hubert Kowalski, who in a matter-of-fact manner described the functioning of software that makes it possible for border guards to tell whether it is a human or animal crossing the border. He described robots that can recognise movement, objects, or the presence of living organisms, and explained the functioning of heat-sensitive cameras installed along borders. He also added that his hobby was re-enactments of historical battles. A little earlier a refugee from Chechnya, Aslan Dekaev, had appeared on the pitch, followed by someone who re-enacts events from World Wars I and II. The artists then wondered out loud whether fifty years from now military-history enthusiasts will be re-enacting the events in Grozny. The situation of obliqueness, uncertainty, and non-action created by Schauplatz was intentional, as the artists consciously renounce control of the situations they set in motion. With their subdued inaction, they provoked viewers to stroll about the Stadium, to enter the field of action — as if the artists’ presence were not important, and they were the reason the viewers were there. ‘We had the impression we had become a sonic background for the audience. It may be somewhat disappointing for an actor, because it means he has failed to attract viewers’ attention. But the Stadium seems to have simply been more important than us.’

http://www.schauplatzinternational.net/

Alternative Economic Cultures in Pixelache

The alt.econ.cult Seminar of Pixelache’s morning KEYNOTE session chaired by Perpetuum Mobilε:


Alternative Economy Cultures part 1 from pixelACHE festival on Vimeo.


Alternative Economy Cultures PART 2 from pixelACHE festival on Vimeo.


Alternative Economy Cultures PART 3 from pixelACHE festival on Vimeo.

Invincible Cities by Camilo José Vergara

Re-posted here form Flavorpill Daily Dose:

"Mapping the shifting landscape of urban America
An interactive website created by sociologist and photographer Camilo José Vergara, Invincible Cities presents "A Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto."

Vergara travels through time. Invincible Cities captures more than three decades of changing streetscapes in Harlem, NY, Richmond, CA, and Camden, NJ. Trace shifting communities via photographs shot from the same vantage point throughout recent history.

The site encompasses multiple journeys. By incorporating ingenious mapping software and thematic tags, Invincible Cities makes it possible to explore many facets of each urban area. Categories include religion, vegetation, people, and junkyards, along with panoramas, artifacts, and census information.

Its interactive potential is just emerging. The ability to post comments beneath each image allows both current and former residents to discuss their neighborhoods. However, the project's future lies in its utility as a tool to inspire community-centered revitalization."

Read a profile on the Richmond project

One Flat Thing, reproduced

Synchronous Objects is a joint project of William Forsythe and OSU's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) and the Department of Dance.

"From dance to data to objects, Synchronous Objects reveals the interlocking systems of organization in the choreography of William Forsythe's 'One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000)"

I re-post here from 'Great Dance Blog'
"The main focus of Synchronous Objects is to develop a set of data visualization tools for capturing, analyzing and presenting the underlying choreographic structures and components of Forsythe's "One Flat Thing, reproduced" (OFTr), which premiered in 2000. These visualizations in the form of information graphics, 2D and 3D animations and visual dance scores will provide audiences, students and researchers with new approaches to thinking about and studying Forsythe's intricate, counter-point work.

Two extended clips of "One Flat Thing" video choreography

One flat thing reproduced 1

One flat thing reproduced 2

To see a variety of data visualizations, visit:

- Information Aesthetics

- EagerEyes.org

- Flowing Data

- Visual Complexity

And also take a look at Many Eyes collaborative visualization application from IBM. Anybody can upload their own data, create a visualization and share it with others."

Exploring William Forsythe's "Synchronous Objects" Website

The Zeitgeist Movement: Orientation Presentation

The Zeitgeist Movement is the activist arm of The Venus Project, which constitutes the life long work of industrial designer and social engineer, Jacque Fresco.

The book of the movement: THE ZEITGEIST MOVEMENT - OBSERVATIONS AND RESPONSES - Activist Orientation Guide

Mr. Fresco’s background includes industrial design and social engineering, as well as being a forerunner in the field of Human Factors.

A documentary, titled Future By Design, on the life, designs and philosophy of Jacque Fresco is now available.
The film Zeitgeist Addendum featuring Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project produced by Peter Joseph was recently released. It can be viewed at www.ZeitgeistMovie.com
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/dloads.htm

Is this a nightmare or a joke?
Is this a new-retro recovery of the ever-evolutionary/progressive positive-thinking of monternism or is this a blooming branch of the emerging hypermodernism?

Faceless-The film

FACELESS was produced under the rules of the 'Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers'. The manifesto states, amongst other things, that additional cameras are not permitted at filming locations, as the omnipresent existing video surveillance (CCTV) is already in operation.
directed by Manu Luksch, voice over: Tilda Swinton, soundtrack: mukul, piano music: Rupert Huber, www.ambientTV.NET

The 4th Radiator festival. Going Underground - Surveillance and Sousveillance.

A very interesting exhibition regarding the city serveillance systems and its counterpart 'sousveillance' (Sousveillance - the counterpart to surveillance, where the ‘observed’ turns around, to face and watch the ‘observer’, recording the observers actions and movements.) of the 4th Radiator festival.
Read a review on Furtherfield

Microcodes by Pall Thayer

Microcodes are very small code-based artworks. Each one is a fully contained work of art. The conceptual meaning of each piece is revealed through a combination of the title, the code and the results of running them on a computer. As works of art these are the creative work of Pall Thayer. As programs they may be copied, distributed, modified and used under the terms of the GNU General Public License v.3 or (at your option) any later version. GPL v.3. If you're interested in running any of these but don't know how, see a brief HowTo. Also, see Rob Myer's review of Microcodes.

You are the moon - Remix (on Open Source Cinema)

r a d i o l o g y a r t - The Inner Beauty of pop objects and foods: A Cultural Scan

In the summer of 2007, artist and medical student Satre Stuelke started the Radiology Art project. Dedicated to the deeper visualization of various objects that hold unique cultural importance in modern society, this project intends to plant a seed of scientific creativity in the minds of all those inclined to participate.

Stuelke acquires the images on an older four-slice CT scanner that is used for research. Most scan parameters include a 120kV tube voltage, 100mA current, 0.625mm slice thickness and interval, 1:1 pitch, 1.25mm beam collimation, and a speed of 1.25mm/rotation. The resulting DICOM images are then processed in Osirix software on a Macintosh iMac computer. Colors are assigned based on the varying densities of materials present throughout the object. Depending on the spread of densities within a particular subject, black or white backgrounds are chosen. Images are further processed in Adobe Photoshop for proper contrast and balance.

Satre Stuelke lives and works in New York City. He has shown his work across the globe in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions and has also sold work through Sotheby's ArtLink. He has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has taught at many prestigious institutions including the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.

http://www.radiologyart.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/science/24scan.html

Harold Cohen

Harold Cohen, former director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), was an English painter with an established international reputation when he came to UCSD in 1968 for a one-year Visiting Professorship. His first experience with computing followed almost immediately, and he never returned to London. Cohen is the author of the celebrated AARON program, an ongoing research effort in autonomous machine (art making) intelligence which began when he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1973. Together, Cohen and AARON have exhibited at London's Tate Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum and many more of the world's major art spaces. They have also been shown at a dozen science centers, including the Ontario Science Center, the Boston Science Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry. Cohen represented the US in the World Fair in Tsukuba, Japan, in 1985. He has a permanent exhibit devoted to his work in Boston's Computer Museum.

One of the few artists ever to have become deeply involved in artificial intelligence, Cohen has given invited papers on his work at major international conferences on AI, computer graphics and art technologies. His work is widely cited in the literature, and it is the subject of Pamela McCorduck's AARON's CODE: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen (Freeman).

In more than two decades AARON has produced many thousands of drawings, to a few dozen of which Cohen has added color. The goal of his current research -- by far the most difficult to date, he says -- is to have AARON do its own coloring. This phase of the project is now well under way. The painting machine with which AARON colored real drawings in the real world was premiered at an exhibit at the Computer Museum in Boston in the spring of 1995.

http://www.viewingspace.com/genetics_culture/pages_genetics_culture/gc_w05/cohen_h.htm

Intersections of Art, Technology, Science & Culture - Links

Steve Wilson's Intersections of Art, Technology, Science & Culture - Links is a database in which systematically documents which artists have explored each area of science and technology
"These links are part of the research for Wilson'sbook Information Arts (MIT Press,2002) and Art, Science, and Technology Today. See the book for more details about the artists, organizations, and texts listed in these links and for extended analysis of the relationship of art and research. The links are constantly being revised and suggestions are welcomed. Feel free to use these resources but please attribute source".
Copyright, 1999-2009 Stephen Wilson.

Art after Crisis

Art After Crisis is a website by traveling writer Chris Keulemans. Ever since his first visit to wartime Sarajevo, he has been fascinated by the way artists reinvent their work, their city and their life after a period of war or dictatorship.
The next year, Keulemans will continue his trips through these cities. Sarajevo, Sofia, Algiers, Beirut, Prishtina, Tirana, Jakarta, Kabul, Buenos Aires, New York, Baghdad...
Along the way, all the material he collects will be on the site. Travel stories, audio interviews, video shots, the photographs of his girlfriend and co-traveler Riette Mellink. And of course, the new art of all these cities itself.
Each city tells its own story through the artists who live there. But it seems that art also follows universal patterns when reinventing the place it comes from: from the original euphoria through the emotional backlash to the emergence of truly new places and ideas. Check out the Beirut Metro Map, the Tirana pyramid, the erotic imagination of Jakarta, the Anne Frank of Sarajevo and all the others...

The Philtre by Boris Nordmann

"Have you ever see yourself with the eyes of someone else ? This is
now possible, with the Philtre! The Philtre is an art installation and also
a patent."
www.lephiltre.com
Boris Nordmann

Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa the creator of 'The 99'

Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa is the creator of THE 99-the first group of superheroes born of an Islamic archetype. THE 99, has received positive attention from the international media including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, Wired, Elle, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Recently, Forbes named THE 99 as one of the top 20 trends sweeping the globe.
http://www.al-mutawa.com/?Biography

The story of 'The 99' the comic
As the leader and mentor of The 99, Dr. Ramzi Razem directs the quest to find the lost Noor Stones of Baghdad, which is the comic book’s main plot line.

As legend has it, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, they razed the largest library in the city, Dar al-Hikma. To erase any record of the civilization, they threw the books into the Tigris River, which ran black with ink. But the caliphate guardians, in a desperate attempt to save the vast knowledge of the library before it was destroyed, concocted an alchemical solution that would absorb the contents of the books. The solution solidified into the 99 Noor Stones, which supposedly contain the lost knowledge of the Library of Baghdad.

Ramzi believes the legend, including the idea that the stones activate superpowers within certain people. He conducts his search through the nonprofit 99 Steps Foundation, and although possessing no superpowers of his own, he helps other characters to use theirs.

Darr-The Afflicter (one of the characters), an American paraplegic who manipulates nerve endings to transmit or prevent pain.
http://www.the99.org/the99/
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0619/p04s01-wome.html

Superflex

“The work of Superflex is about
social-economic practice. Unlike many visual artists, we don’t offer
criticisms or critiques, we propose real solutions to real problems”
http://superflex.net/

Bjornstjerne Christiansen, Rasmus Nielsen, Jakob Fenger form the Copenhagen based art collective SUPERFLEX. They have worked together for fifteen years. The focus of SUPERFLEX’s exhibition at ARTSPACE, If Value, Then Copy is on copyright issues. Exploring concepts around branding, ownership of products, images and ideas, their ongoing practice in this area includes projects such as Guaraná Power. For this project SUPERFLEX worked with farmers in the Brazilian Amazon to create a drink called Guaraná Power, this involved the formation of a new brand that closely followed and yet subtly challenged the leading brand, whose monopoly on the market was impinging on the rights and conditions of the local farmers.

SUPERFLEX are committed to questioning dominant world power relationships and developing economically viable structures for specific communities. Their strategy includes what they describe as tools:

“The work of SUPERFLEX is about social-economic practice. Unlike many visual artists, we don’t offer criticisms or critiques, we propose real solutions to real problems.” Says Bjornstjerne, who is in Auckland till the end of October. “Our fundamental premise is that there is too much ownership in terms of intellectual property, trademark and copyright laws, and this excess of power needs to be challenged.”
http://www.artspace.org.nz/exhibitions/2008/superflex.asp

'Oblique Strategies' by Brian Eno/ Peter Schmidt

The Oblique Strategies are a deck of cards. They measured about 2-3/4" x 3-3/4". They came in a small black box which said "OBLIQUE STRATEGIES" on one of the top's long sides and "BRIAN ENO/PETER SCHMIDT" on the other side. The cards were solid black on one side, and had the aphorisms printed in a 10-point sans serif face on the other.

The deck itself had its origins in the discovery by Brian Eno that both he and his friend Peter Schmidt (a British painter whose works grace the cover of "Evening Star" and whose watercolours decorated the back LP cover of Eno's "Before and After Science" and also appeared as full-size prints in a small number of the original releases) tended to keep a set of basic working principles which guided them through the kinds of moments of pressure - either working through a heavy painting session or watching the clock tick while you're running up a big buck studio bill. Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking - to jog the mind.

http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/OSintro.html

"Collision: Interarts Practice and Research" _ Book

Contents from "Collision: Interarts Practice and Research" book

Part V: Performative Collisions and Collisions in Performance
Chapter Eighteen ...................... 261
Feminist Performance, Community, and Violence: Conversations
between Elizabeth Chitty, Margaret Dragu and Julie Lassonde
Julie Lassonde
Chapter Nineteen ...................... 277
Interarts Performativities: Writing-Drawing-Architecture
Leoni Schmidt
Chapter Twenty ........................ 299
The Aesthetics of Disappointment
Andreas Kahre and Heidi Taylor
Chapter Twenty-One ................ 315
Ruptured Flesh, Gaps in Time: Between Performance and Pain
Christine Stoddard

http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Collision--Interarts-Practice-and-Research1-4438-0031-7.htm
.pdf sample http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/978-1-4438-0031-0-sample.pdf

The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal

http://www.toutfait.com
more on Art Science Research Laboratory
http://www.asrlab.org/

Edward Ihnatowicz

Edward Ihnatowicz was a Cybernetic Sculptor active in the late 1960's and early 1970's. His ground-breaking sculptures explored the interaction between his robotic works and the audience, and reached their height with The Senster, a large (15 feet long), hydraulic robot commissioned by the electronics giant, Philips, for their permanent showplace, the Evoluon, in Eindhoven in 1970. The sculpture used sound and movement sensors to react to the behaviour of the visitors. It was one of the first computer controlled interactive robotic works of art.
http://www.senster.com

Panoscope 360 by Luc Courchesne

http://panoscope360.com/
http://tot.sat.qc.ca/dispositifs_panoscopes.html
http://www.lamic.ulaval.ca/recherche/lieux_de_recherche/laboratoire_de_visualisatio
http://www.pfoac.com/zOLDSITE/artists/lc-english.htm
http://www.pfoac.com/index_FR.html#VIEW
http://www.din.umontreal.ca/courchesne/

"There is nothing in a Caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a Butterfy"

by R. Buckminster Fuller

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index
http://challenge.bfi.org/ideaindex

The Whitney's Buckminster Fuller: Starting with Universe
http://www.whitney.org/www/buckminster_fuller/about.jsp

Urban Life Intervensions

Watch the Guerilla London 2007 set of 6 videos.
More here.

CVM - Center for Visual Music

http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/
http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Library.html
http://www.si21.com/interakt/

Craig Baldwin

is a filmmaker and curator whose interests lie in archival retrieval and recombinatory forms of cinema, performance, and installation. He is the recipient of several grants, including those from the Rockefeller Foundation, Alpert Award, Creative Capital, Phelan, AFI, FAF, and California Arts Council. Over the last two decades, his productions have been shown and awarded at numerous international festivals, museums, and institutes of contemporary art, often in conjunction with panels, juries, and workshops on collage and cultural activism. His own weekly screening project, Other Cinema, has continued to premiere experimental, essay, and documentary works for over a quarter century, recently expanding into DVD publishing.
http://www.othercinema.com/cbfilmography.html
http://www.othercinema.com/

Synthazards

Synthazards are synthetic fabrications of natural hazards which forms are generated by various algorithms and machines. They are manufactured by using different rapid prototyping techniques, laser cutouts, and cnc. The following natural hazards are prototyped: earthquake, drought, whirlpool, lightning, volcano, tsunami, tornado and lava. The objects are focusing on formal aspects of these phenomena. What is apparent in fabrications is a unique synthetic form, which is given by algorithms and inscribed in the language of prototyping machines.
http://www.syntfarm.org/projects/synthazards/
by http://syntfarm.org/
syntfarm (Germany/Serbia/Singapore) is founded by Andreas Schlegel and Vladimir Todorovic in April 2007 in the very clean city of Singapore. The group focuses on the preservation of expressions and structures that are found in various dynamic (eco)systems.

http://www.ktonycia.com/

http://www.improvisa.es/

Edu-Factory

Conflicts and Transformations of the University
http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/

Bonnie Prince Billy - Workhorse

directed by Harmony Korine

Leonard Shlain

Dr. Shlain is a best-selling author of three books, Art and Physics: The Parallel Visions of Space, Time and Light, Alphabet Vs. The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image and Sex, Time & Power: How Woman’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution. A favorite among artists, scientists, philosophers, anthropologists and educators, he has lectured at such venues as Harvard, The New York Museum of Modern Art, Cern, Los Alamos, The Phillips Collection, Florence Academy of Art and the European Council of Ministers. His fourth book about Leonardo Da Vinci “Leonardo’s Brain: The Right - Left Roots of Creativity” is nearly completed and in typical Leonard Shlain fashion he is determined to finish it, however he will be canceling his currently scheduled speaking engagements.
http://leonardshlainsbrain.com/site/

"The Puppet" by Ibrahim Al-Koni,

Ibrahim Al-Koni, scion of a Libyan Tuareg family, is regarded as the great writer of the Sahara. In his new novel "The Puppet" Al-Koni perceptively depicts the way in which the modern world intrudes into the Tuaregs' traditional society.
A fundamental examination of the phenomenon of emergent capitalism: Al-Koni's Die Puppe ("The Puppet", not yet available in English translation)
A presentation of the novel by Kersten Knipp

Lipotechnica

Lipotechnica is an international, integrated energy company based in Estonia.
It aims to manufacture, use and market clean burning fat. Lipotechnica is a proud producer of groundbreaking cost and enivronmental friendly Biofuel.
If all goes as planned for the company Lipotechnica and their development, a part of the city's vehicles get their fuel from a greasy, yellowish liquid distilled from the remnants of liposuction.
The research team at Lipotechnica has developed groundbreaking techniques of efficiently and economically production of a biofuel based on leftover products from liposuction. Making use of human medical waste products Lipotechnica is picking up the race with companies like ConocoPhillips making use of poultry fat - only their product line will have a nonviolent and high ecological profile.

http://www.lipotechnica.com/

Processing

http://processing.org/
Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students.

120 Feet of Video Art: Final Exams at NYU's Big Screens Class
Dan Shiffman isn't like most professors. Instead of Scantron sheets and bluebooks, Shiffman prefers to give his final exams on a 120-foot video wall that's the equivalent of six 16:9 displays linked end-to-end.
Shiffman, a wizard of the graphical programming language called Processing that many of the students use to fill up the screen (a few others use openFrameworks, another visual language) has taught this class for two years now. Processing has been used in tons of music videos, data visualizations and interactive video art and is popular for its relative simplicity as a way to turn code into amazing visuals.

view more here



Shiffman is the primary author of the "Most Pixels Ever" library for Processing, which allows projects to sync up across multiple displays seamlessly without delays—and not just your dual-head monitor.That hasn’t really been an option thus far in Processing, unless you were to go the hardware multiple-monitor route. Most Pixels Ever is amazing because it can handle the 6 million pixels of IAC's video wall without blinking, and without it, this class would not exist in its current form. All the art-tech nerds thank him as we file out the door.

Read more here

Laurie Simmons's film 'The Music of Regret,'

ACT2:'Excellent Moon'


Cafe Song


from 'The Music of Regret,' by Laurie Simmons, featuring Adam Guettel as The Dummy // music M. Rohatyn, lyrics L. Simmons.

'The Music of Regret' is a mini-musical in three acts. The film is inspired by three distinct periods of Laurie Simmon’s photographic work. Vintage childcraft puppets, ventriloquist dummies and walking objects enact three tales of ambition, disappointment, love and regret. more

Read lyrics of the songs here

'The Music of Regret''s acts I and III also staged and performed live as part of PERFORMA05



Many more wonderful photographs and artworks at the artist's website

You can read also an interview here

Technologically Expanded Dance

http://tercius.wordpress.com/

A new book accompanied by DVD "TeDance - Perspectives on Technologically Expanded Dance" has been published by Daniel Tércio.

"When preparing this paper, I have started attempting to identify a Portuguese accent. In order to do so, I have chronologically listed dance pieces exhibited in Portugal by Portuguese, or Portugal-based, choreographers, where intersections with new technologies were portrayed. Soon I was to face a curious dilemma: how would one distinguish ‘new technologies’? And above all, how would one identify those artworks where the authors take up technology not only as devices or resources but as dramaturgically purposeful?"
“Dance and Technology with Portuguese accent at the crossroads” excerpt, by Daniel Tércio.

In Tedance. Perspectives on Technologically Expanded Dance. Lisbon, FMH, 2009. 249 pp. Paper plus a DVD. ISBN: 987-972-735-160-2

Sonom

Suicide
Instalation. Starting from free rights footage from clinical re-education to suicides at 30´s at USA
http://www.sonom.org/



[ Ether ] from Sonom on Vimeo

Agua [ Element ]

Agua [ Element ] from Sonom on Vimeo.

"Monolit" a fresh one

[ Monolit ] from Sonom on Vimeo.

Voice Drawing by zefrank

http://www.zefrank.com/
A very nice voice drawing by zefrank here

Visit also zefrank's blog and site for many interactive and participating toys

Messa di Voce (2003: Golan Levin, Zachary Lieberman, Jaap Blonk, and Joan La Barbara) augments the speech, shouts and songs produced by a pair of virtuoso vocalists with real-time interactive visualizations. The project touches on themes of abstract communication, synaesthetic relationships, cartoon language, and writing and scoring systems, within the context of a sophisticated, playful, and virtuosic audiovisual narrative.



One very nice stop motion animation re-posted here from zefrank's blog
Her Morning Elegance / Oren Lavie



Her Morning Elegance
Directed by Oren Lavie, Yuval and Merav Nathan
Featuring Shir Shomron
Photography by Eyal Landesman
Color Todd Iorio / Resolution

Oren Lavie is a songwriter of curly brown hair, whisperish voice, green eyes and suspiciously cold feet. He was born in 1976, two minutes behind schedule, and has been trying to catch up ever since.

CAPITALISM HITS THE FAN

english//38,54 Min//04.12.2008
- A Marxian View - Professor Rick Wolff, Department of Economics, UMass Amherst, October 7, 2008

Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player.

http://kanalb.org/clip.php?clipId=2188&Vlang=eng

Jennifer Steinkamp

A visual artist who crafts computer-animated projections for site-specific spaces, Jennifer Steinkamp uses her work to explore new means of producing and experiencing art. Employing virtual-reality software like a painter wields a brush, Steinkamp constructs lifelike installations of nature in motion, derived entirely from code.

The artwork is interactive. Steinkamp builds her pieces in relation to their site's architecture, and sets the projectors at a low level so the viewer's shadow disrupts the imagery, provoking a playful point of immersion.
http://jsteinkamp.com/



Loom consisted of two overlapping video projections; one contained a horizontal pattern, while the other vertical. When combined, the two created a weave. Because there were two projections at angles, the viewer created two shadows that disrupted the projection; one shadow revealed the vertical lines while the other was filled with horizontal lines. The image formed a cube that matched the perspective of the space, which was a deep tunnel. The lines warped with a water like pattern.

The T-Mobile Dance

SocioPatterns.org

SocioPatterns.org aims to shed light on patterns in social dynamics and coordinated human activity. We do so by reporting on experiments, data analyses and visualisations designed and conducted by ourselves as well as carried out by other groups.

SocioPatterns.org focuses on exposing patterns. We are specifically interested in experiments that gather data, and visualizations that present the data in novel and insightful ways.

dance-techLIVE

http://www.dance-tech.net/page/dancetechlive-beta

Watch 50 Categorized Dance Animation Videos

Here you will find categorized links to more than 50 posts on Great Dance that include videos of many different types of dance and movement animations such as 2D and 3D, stop-motion, visual effects, interactive performances and installations, computer games, machinima, live action and CG, motion graphics, visualizations, pre-cinema and many other types.

The OpenEnded Group

http://www.openendedgroup.com/
The OpenEnded Group is three digital artists — Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser — who create works for stage, screen, gallery, page, and public space.
Kaiser and Eshkar have collaborated on numerous projects since the mid-1990s. Interested from the start in creating a new kind of 3D space that did not aspire to photorealism, we thought instead about drawing. Soon we formulated the notions of drawing as performance and hand-drawn space, which we then applied to motion-captured performance in a series of collaborations with choreographers. Of these, perhaps the best known are BIPED, with Merce Cunningham, and Ghostcatching, with Bill T. Jones.
Watch videos like 'Verge (Complete)' (Verge uses volumetric light to explore the idea of “blind 3D” in which black zones of the image may be read as voids or as dark solids) and clips 'Movement Principles' of Robert Wilson's instructions on how to move your body on stage

eva and franco mattes have a new show in Mumbai, India, opening Saturday the 3rd, it's called "Traveling by telephone".

http://www.galeriems.com
http://www.timeoutmumbai.net/art/arts_preview_details.asp?code=74
Eva and Franco Mattes are known as the Bonnie and Clyde of contemporary art.

Interviewing artists Eva and Franco Mattes is confusing because Eva and Franco are not really real. “Once we were watching a Fassbinder movie and a journalist called,” the artist who uses the name Franco recalled in an email interview with Time Out Mumbai from Italy. “He wanted a name to write on the paper. We said we didn’t want any names, he insisted so Eva looked at the TV screen and there was the actress Eva Mattes, so she promptly said ‘OK, you won, my name is Eva Mattes’.” The name Franco was picked because it means honest in Italian. There are, however, some things about them that have been confirmed. They are the website 0100101110101101.org. They have watched and loved Sholay (“Sholay was like Sergio Leone on drugs!” they said). This fortnight, they will make their Indian debut at Galerie Mirchandani+ Steinruecke.

Eva and Franco Mattes are recognised as pioneers in the field of net art, which involves scrambling or copying internet codes. For Life Sharing (2000), they submitted themselves to a year of satellite surveillance during which their every move was monitored. In 2003, they courted media attention with an elaborate prank titled Nikeground. Nikeground circulated the rumour that Nike was going to buy and rename the town square Karlsplatz in Vienna which would be renamed Nikeplatz. The point was to trick an entire city and to a large extent, they succeeded. However, the protests they had expected against the privatisation of public spaces didn’t materialise. In 2006, the duo decided to make art out of and in Second Life, a virtual world where members, known as Residents, interact with each other using online personae, known as avatars. Second Life avatars are three-dimensional and animated, hovering between realistic, robotic and cartoonish. “We have always experimented with drugs, especially LSD,” said Franco. “We like being totally spaced out and see the world from a different perspective. Second Life reminded me a bit of that feeling, like being in Blade Runner or in Neuromancer.”

In 2006, Ars Virtua, a gallery in Second Life, hosted an exhibition by Franco and Eva Mattes at which they showed portraits of characters in Second Life. The same show, with the avatars were printed on canvas, was also taken to more conventional gallery spaces across Europe and in New York. The age-old European tradition of portraiture met the pop-art sensibility of Andy Warhol, held up a mirror to ideas of beauty and explored how identity is constructed in contemporary society. In Second Life, “masks are not there to hide your real identity”, explained Franco. “On the contrary they are there to show who you really are, since you can ignore social restrictions. Since we’ve been living fake identities all of our lives, it’s obvious that we are attracted by a world of avatars.”

The tension between the real and the virtual also inspired the Synthetic Performances series in which Franco and Eva recreated a number of famous performance art projects in Second Life. They picked “the most weird performances; maybe for all the sex and pain involved, which is completely absent, or, well, ‘abstract’ in a [video] game”, said Franco, who hates performance art as a genre and can’t see the point of it. In Mumbai, they will show the re-enactments of Chris Burden’s “Shoot”, Marina Abramovic’s “Seven Easy Pieces” and Gilbert & George’s “The Singing Sculpture” on large screens. The synthetic world of Second Life robs performance art of its central characteristic: spontaneity. Everything is mediated through avatars and feels oddly abstracted. The jerky, movements of the avatars further underscore the artificiality of the performances.

A number of Eva and Franco’s projects have been about art. Between 1998 and 2000, the duo created the fictional artist Darko Maver, by setting up a website and posting pictures of his art works, which recreated scenes of murder and violence using mannequins (in reality, they were pictures of real crime scenes that were freely available online). They convinced many of the existence of this Serbian artist, only to eventually kill him. In 2001, they scrambled the code of the website of Korean Web Art festival so that the works of artists were exchanged. “I’m afraid I have a love-hate relation with art,” said Franco. “I love it so much that I’m afraid to find out it may well be all bullshit, like a religious guy who after a whole life lived piously finds out before dying that god does not exist.”

The duo’s newest works, some of which will be shown in Mumbai, are photos “shot inside” a game called Half-Life. It’s been one of their tougher challenges. “Every shot was taken while killing aliens, struggling with radioactive traps or while escaping helicopters,” said Franco. “Sometimes I had to go through the whole scheme over and over for hours, because every time I was trying to stand still and make the photo, some goddamn alien was trying to eat my brain.”

"Theater Of War" by John Walter

John Walter labels his film Theater Of War “a documentary about art and politics,” which is the kind of blatant provocation meant to pay homage to the film’s ostensible subject, Bertolt Brecht. In 2006, Walter was allowed to film the rehearsals for George C. Wolfe’s Central Park production of Brecht’s anti-war play Mother Courage And Her Children, starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Austin Pendleton, with a Tony Kushner translation and songs by Jeanine Tesori. Walter was also granted extended time with Streep, who allowed a rare and reluctant glimpse at her process in deference to Brecht, an artist who favored exposing his own artifice. Walter intersperses his coverage of the Mother Courage production with biographical sketches and analysis of Brecht—much of it provided by post-modern novelist Jay Cantor. At one point, Walter shoots some stock footage of Cantor working at his computer, then cuts to a shot of what Cantor is writing: a few idle lines about how much he hates pretending to work for the sake of a movie.

Though Theater Of War is informative—both about Brecht and about the effort it takes to mount a big New York production—Walter overreaches in trying to connect Brecht’s anti-war sentiment with contemporary protest movements, and doesn’t do more than dabble with the themes of truth and representation in documentary filmmaking. There’s an interesting section about how in Brecht’s 1947 appearance before HUAC, he used his own theatrical techniques to throw Congress off the scent of his Marxist leanings; for the most part though, Walter is unable to make the intersection between art and politics in Brecht’s work really come to life. The problem is built into the documentary’s design. While Theater Of War contains a few direct, empathetic moments—like Kushner describing how Mother Courage changed his life when he read it in college, or Streep explaining that she sees her role in theatrical revivals to be “the voice of dead people”—Walter would rather we care about the ideas this film raises, not the people we meet. Which is very Brechtian, to be sure, but not always so engaging
http://www.avclub.com/content/cinema/theater_of_war?utm_source=imdb_rss_1
http://filmmakermagazine.com/directorinterviews/2008/12/john-walter-theater-of-war.php

Brain Power Video - CBS News

Watch CBS Videos Online